Cloud costs are often touted as being less expensive than traditional on-premise infrastructure support costs. But the opposite can also be true for those who are less informed. Understanding cloud costs and how to manage them is the difference between success and failure.
Just as “server sprawl” was a problem in data centers, “cloud sprawl” has quickly become a challenge for companies going all-in on cloud providers. The cloud is scalable and elastic, but with this new ability to scale resources up and down comes the risk of underutilizing or wasting resources you forget about over time—negating any potential cost savings in the cloud.
Organizations that migrate to the cloud without proper controls, correct expectations, and a disciplined understanding of how cloud billing works are in for a big surprise. That’s why it’s critical to understand where and how to leverage the cloud, while constantly monitoring and controlling costs can help you succeed.
Understanding some of the major challenges ahead of time can help you optimize your cloud services and costs.
Key challenges
- Gaining visibility into AWS or other cloud resources spread across several functions and teams
- Reducing waste and unnecessary cloud spend by finding unused and idle resources
- Improving cost allocation and chargebacks while planning for capacity
- Keeping the cloud secure
While native cloud tools provide some help, they don’t tell the whole story. The AWS console, for example, doesn’t indicate the number of resources being used – such as the number of running instances, RDS databases, Lamda functions, EKS clusters, and so on. For organizations running multiple clouds, there is no good way to optimize services.
Cimpl Cloud was developed to provide an easy way to optimize all cloud services in a single tool. It provides cost controls for the cloud along with actionable insights that will maximize your ROI over the long-term. Cimpl Cloud offers 600+ best practice checks – many time more than any native cloud tools – to manage day-to-day operations and gain additional insights.
Security is another essential aspect of cloud optimization. Beyond saving money, Cimpl Cloud minimizes potential security risks. For example, it will detect an unused instance that doesn’t meet the latest security requirements.
Cloud visibility, reporting, and automated alerts in Cimpl Cloud empowers IT teams and business leaders to answer the question, “What do I need to worry about?”
Some of the key benefits organizations achieve with Cimpl Cloud:
- Increased cloud visibility, collaboration, and shared summary utilization reports across teams
- Significant annualized savings by eliminating idle and unused resources
- Data-driven planned purchases and tracked expenses with robust tagging and committed usage recommendations
- Uncovering potential discounts, managing reserved instances, and meeting as much on-demand consumption as possible
- Right-sizing and correctly provisioning resources to eliminate waste
- Tighter cloud security and compliance with required frameworks
Ready to optimize with Cimpl?
Ready to give Cimpl Cloud a whirl? Technology expense management made simple. Learn how you can optimize your cloud environment by booking a demo. It’s that Cimpl.